How you feel can affect your ability to carry out everyday activities, your relationships, and your overall mental health. How you react to your experiences and feelings can also change over time, as situational factors and circumstances evolve.
Emotional wellness is the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times. There are many ways you can improve your mental health and emotional well-being.
While everyone feels stressed from time to time and stress can give you a rush of energy when it’s needed most, if stress becomes pervasive (a condition known as chronic stress), those “high-alert” changes become harmful rather than helpful. Learning healthy ways to cope with stress can also boost your resilience. Harnessing stress can be a great kickstart to your lifelong goals toward a healthy mind, body, and soul.
At Therapy For You, it is our goal to encourage positive mental health and well-being as we highlight the important benefits of counseling and therapy.
Here are nine ways to help improve your mental health and emotional well-being:
1. Value yourself: Treat yourself with kindness and respect and avoid self-defeating thoughts.
- Take care of your body: Pay attention to what your body needs.
- Enjoy good company: Surround yourself with people who contribute positively to your life.
- Be patient with yourself: Everyday won’t be your best day.
- Learn to cope: Develop healthy strategies for coping with stress, disappointment, and changes.
- Take care of yourself: Learn new ways of self-maintenance and practice self-care as a routine.
- Set realistic goals: If your goals are unrealistic, then you can never meet your own expectations.
- Break unhealthy cycles and patterns: Just because it’s how it has always been does not mean it has to continue being that way.
- Find someone to talk to about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors: Once you receive objective feedback, you can begin the process toward change.
Machel Hunt is a clinical therapist based in Atlanta specializing in relationship counseling and psychosexual therapy for individuals and couples. Learn more at www.sextherapyforyou.com.